E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Today's Guardian mentions a study that shows that only 3 of the top 100 singles this year were in the rock and roll category.  Hip hop and Dance and Pop are the new kings.  Most rock stars are in their 50s, 60s or older, and few young Turks are on the way up with anything like the same levels of support or fanbase of their elders.  One commentator suggests rock and roll is as dead as Jazz.  What does this mean for performance poetry in the UK, which saw itself as a new kind of "rock and roll"?  Clearly, rap is, as David Brent noted in one episode of The Office , "the new Wordsworth ", but where does that leave contemporary mainstream poetry?  It seems hard enough to imagine ever being as popular as Elvis Costello , let alone hearing his genre is going the way of the Dodo too... or is that Dido ?

The Irish in Britain have been welcomed and included, at the highest levels of cultural activity, for more than a century - one recalls Yeats in London, one thinks of Faber's healthy Irish list now.  The green passport has allowed a comfortable sense of kinship to develop, so that more than one contemporary poetry anthology of British poetry has felt the need, indeed, the wish, to include Irish brothers and sisters.  It must come as something of a rude awakening, then, to see that this friendship was fickle, and about a nickel, or pound, deep, in some quarters.  No less than The Guardian's Polly Toynbee has argued in today's paper that the Irish have been "terrible neighbours to us" (Britain) because of the tax rate of 12.5%; and, many less-left politicians and public figures, in the Tory party and mad media, have expressed outrage that so much largesse should be shown, so much noblesse obligingly proferred, to Ireland. I find talk of bad neighbourliness a bit ...

Now that the Guardian has listed its top 25 films in 7 categories (Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Action, Art-House, Comedy, Crime and Romance) I must observe the following - any list of the top 175 movies which does not include, in no order, Shane, The Third Man, The Silence of the Lambs, 20 000 Leagues Under The Sea, Fantasia, Rambo, The Shawshank Redemption,  Lawrence of Arabia, Mr. Majestyk, Ice Station Zebra, The Poseidon Adventure, The Wrath of Khan, Pretty Woman, The Elephant Man, Out of Africa, Sophie's Choice, Schindler's List, The Sting, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Midnight Cowboy, Titanic, or An Officer and a Gentleman , can hardly be said to represent the best of genre films.  On the other hand, it is good to see Mulholland Dr., Pulp Fiction, Touch of Evil, Vertigo, Peeping Tom , Days of Heaven , and a few other classics, there.

The Guardian is one of the more left-leaning, liberal, newspapers, but whenever it reports on Poetry with a capital P, it tends to be about as radical as The Daily Telegraph or The Sun .  Witness its big spread in Friday's G2 section , which, to its credit, emphasizes the good news that "Poetry" is alive and well in the UK, and, according to Don Paterson (cue that photo of his blue piercing gaze) selling as well as much literary fiction.  Alongside this lively piece, is a brief canonical to-read-list, by Sarah Crown , suggesting 8 "essential poets" : Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Sean O'Brien, Don Paterson, Craig Raine, Geoffrey Hill, Jo Shapcott and Alice Oswald .  Not one of these poets, of course, deserves to not be listed - they are all very good poets, and a handful of them may be touched by genius. Still, it seems a little wearying to see that this establishment list is offered as the main example of what's on offer today - after all the...

Sad news. The death of Old Labour seems confirmed with the death of the great Michael Foot , an idealist and Labour leader whose "longest suicide note in history" was none other than a long list of ethically valid and visionary demands. Foot falls into the category of those "peace mongers" and gadflys who sometimes get into positions of genuine power (one thinks of Jimmy Carter , perhaps Obama ) and are then accused of weakness when their integrity and goodwill is thwarted by wicked and small-minded men and women, who argue that what is actually needed is electability and pragmatism. Stuff and nonsense. AH was electable, so was Bush . A lot of very evil people have been practical - see Arendt . In fact, what the world has always needed are idealists, dreamers, and far-seers - and those are the ones that too often get defeated, by the likes of Thatcher and co. Sadly, too, Tony Blair came along and sleeked and slicked the Foot vision, in the process getting ...

Aslan, of course, was reborn thanks to an older magic; and in Holy Week it is good to know that some forces are at work to counteract the far newer atheism. Madeleine Bunting 's thoughtful piece in The Guardian considers ways that scepticism of religion can be more creatively nuanced, and how even Andrew Motion wonders at what it would be like to believe. More importantly, she reminds her readers that religious faith can be a constantly enacted process - not a dumb-list of things to obey - and, for the Christian, must ultimately be about love - a love that forgives and is kind.

Jeet Thayil , the Indian poet, has edited an important new anthology of Indian poetry (in the English tradition), just out from Bloodaxe, a book Eyewear will review in time. Before then, it needs to be said that The Guardian ran a hugely blundering (and borderline offensive) review of the book - a dismissal by other means - on Saturday, an odd act since the UK has been in need of such a collection for more than a decade. I have long believed that the best of Indian English-language contemporary poetry, from the likes of Ranjit Hoskote , Vivek Narayanan , and Sudeep Sen , is among the best of contemporary poetry from anywhere - and its lack of availability, until now, was almost silly, if not sad. So, Thayil should have been thanked first, criticised, if at all, later. Anyway, he's responded .

The Guardian has a slogan online: "comment is free". Too true. I've noticed, lately, that sometimes articles appear (in print) in The Guardian , and other papers, a few days after the same ideas, even phrases, and images, have circulated, freely, in (on?) the blogosphere - including, a few times, at Eyewear . Most recently, today, columnist Mark Lawson has a piece on the poet laureate, referencing John Sergeant , Obama (not normally two subjects linked, I'd have thought) and other comments that strongly echo my post of a few days back on the same subject. Coincidence? Surely. However, bloggers are doing a lot of the unpaid gruntwork these days, it seems to me, for the "professional" media commentariat, and, since we all know (from plagiarism cases on campus) that "Googling" can get results, fast, it is surely time that some credit is due, when whole arguments or themes are lifted, verbatim, from popular blogs.

The Guardian's been running a series, all week, of little pamphlet inserts, titled Great Lyricists (of what isn't made clear, but the mainly contemporary scene, apparently). Of the eight, two are Canadian, and one was born near the Canadian border ( Cohen , Joni Mitchell , and Dylan ). Three more are entirely American ( Springsteen , Patti Smith and Chuck D ). Two are British (which is very international of The Guardian : the bitter genius Morrissey , and Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner ). One wonders where John Lennon or Ian Dury are - and further back, the two undisputed heavyweights of song lyrics of the 20th century (in English) Cole Porter and Noel Coward . Turner seems a little out of his league. What comes across - and this isn't the first time I have thought of this issue given I have been interested in spoken word poetry for the last 14 years or so - is how bare the lyrics mainly are. Chuck D's and Dylan's and Cohen's are the best, because the...

Speaking of "the canon" and modern poetry - The Guardian is publishing seven pamphlet inserts this week, starting today. They've selected seven poets: Sassoon, Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Plath, Hughes and Heaney . Now, the first thing to say is, this is a good group - almost all would make most people's top 10 or 20 list of significant poets from 1908-2008. Clearly, the emphasis is on British poetry, and also on the second half of the twentieth century (just). What is worth noting (though Eyewear in principle supports the mass distribution of poetry to newspaper readers at all times) is that this is completely a list taken from Faber and Faber's stable of poets. Now, they also publish Frost, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens , in the UK, so Faber's top ten would still have been very admirable. And one might have added Lowell, Moore, Berryman and even Thomas Hardy , and they'd have been Faber, too. Ditto for W.S. Graham . Yeats seems curiously missing here ...

The Observer today reports on the vicious cyber-bullying that has been dished out to the son, Max Gogarty , of a Guardian travel writer after he was given a prestigious blog space on that paper's world-famous site, accused of benefiting from nepotism, armed with middle class bona fides (the UK media world is often thought to be rife with such things). What strikes me, immediately, is how odd it is that this young man, and this rather common incident, suddenly receive such attention. Might it in fact be because, indeed, his father is well-connected? His father, after all, has written many travel articles for the paper in question, and the many bloggers who began to ask why they should be excited to follow his son's gap year hols had a point, surely, though some may have pushed it too far. His father is quoted as noting the quintessentially cruel nature of this bullying. Well, actually, no. The British can be cruel - but the online community, in general, is no stranger to snarl...

No one wants to see people stoned in the public squares of England - though everyone does get stoned, to paraphrase one Mr. Dylan . Still, one figure has been drawn and quartered of late - Dr. Williams . It's therefore good to see the clunking fist of GB (Gordon Brown) retracted . The commentariat of London and beyond should be ashamed of themselves - England's famous tolerance for free speech seems to extend only so far - the limit being questioning Secularism's rising tide. This is the week-end, after all, which saw The Guardian distribute free copies of its Darwin booklet, with the drooling praise of Dr. Dawkins . Darwin (himself a religious man, at the end merely agnostic) is a little god now, as the patron saint of British scientism and atheism - as if he killed God with his observations. There's talk of painting a "Sistine Chapel" ceiling for him in some great museum. What I think is worth noting in all of this is what Dr. Williams really said, what re...

I thought this recent Guardian article on Facebook funny - especially the awkward phrase: "And Britons do it online more than anyone else in the world, except for Canadians." Actually, no - that should read: "Canadians do it more than anyone else in the world, followed by the British."

In a somewhat Ouroboros-like way, Eyewear is glad to note that one its recent posts, on the 2007 TS Eliot Poetry Prize shortlist, has been published in today's Guardian Review section, in its regular roundup of literary blogs. As The Guardian noted, earlier this week, blogging, and the use of social networking, is becoming an increasingly widespread, and respectable, phenomenon in Britain - much like writing letters used to be. Meanwhile, as co-founder of the original Poetry group on Facebook, I'm pleased to mention that the first winners of the first Poetry Facebook contest will be announced later this month.

Sean O'Brien , in today's Guardian , writes of the affliction of poetry - not, in his way of thinking, a career at all - but rather, a bit of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't kind of thing: one either writes poetry or goes mad, or writes poetry and goes mad, as he memorably, and dramatically, suggests. I find much of this article convincing, and thoughtful, and useful reading, especially for non-poets, who often don't consider the immense and usually near-useless sacrifice that most poets make of their lives (as O'Brien reminds us Eliot had noted); for every two or three poets in each generation that continue to be read 50-100 years later (name three poets of the 1890s who are really read widely now, other than Yeats , Wilde and Swinburne ; okay, now name ten; now name twenty.... now make a list of the 100-200 poets writing now...) the hundreds who also spent their lives on poetry (and it is a spending) are mainly lost to indifference, or studied, if at all...

Eyewear is glad to live in the digital age where replies can be fairly immediate. Dr. Sarah Churchwell (pictured) has kindly replied to my post on her column on The Bourne series (and agreed it may be reprinted here). Her complete email of today is below: Dear Todd, Thank you for your comment, which I read with interest. I don't disagree with your assessment of the film, for the most part, although I'm not generally leaping onto the 'greatest thriller since le Carré' bandwagon. I think they are enjoyable films, and I have a lot of time for Matt Damon, who I think is a very intelligent and interesting actor. I found this film fun but so deeply silly that it is hard for me to take it seriously as a moral statement of any kind, except in so far as it is about taking responsibility, an idea which it deals with consistently, if rather overtly for my taste. But that's not a criticism, necessarily, it's just not my cup of tea to have things explained so carefully to ...

Richard Harries , in today's Guardian Review , admirably and cleverly takes on Christopher Hitchens , whose new book is a direct frontal assault on religion and a belief in God. The main theme of all the recent anti-God tracts published in England and abroad is that man hands on misery to man, and that this deepening coastal shelf of pain was made by true believers - entirely ignoring the truth that the fact of man's wickedness is the best reason for the need for religion, not the best reason to assume it is yet another human evil. Religion - at its height - symbolizes the horizon at which the human finds possible perfection - hardly an aim worthy of such hack indignation... This at a time when Hypocrite-in-Chief Tony Blair has met the Pope in Rome, on his way to becoming a Catholic - an admirable road to take, but one which will be paved with the need for a great deal of soul-searching, or at least, forgiveness. Lying to the nation and helping to instigate an illegal war ar...

Eyewear notes that The Guardian's ongoing exploration of whether poetry is newsworthy or not continues to swing, like a Viennese pendulum, between Thanatos ("poetry is dead says Martin Amis") and Eros (see below). There is a lot of poetry - political or simply well-written - worth writing about, that doesn't involve anything quite as sensational as a Nobel-prize-winning poet cavorting with three nuns in a convent, after all... http://www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,,2106160,00.html

Avid readers of Eyewear will recall that last Saturday brought some issues with The Guardian's coverage of poetry in Britain. This Saturday, the Oxford-based poet, Alan Buckley (who will be reading for the Oxfam series this Autumn), replies, with a published letter. http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2103941,00.html

Today's Saturday Guardian Review section seems designed to send Eyewear into overdrive. The Page 3 Boy is Martin Amis , the UK's latest celebrity creative writing professor, quoted as saying (at the Guardian's own Hay festival) "You may have noticed that poetry is dead. The obituary has already been written. It has a ghoulish afterlife in readings and poetry slams ... not many people curl up of an evening with a book of poetry ... reading a poem involves self-examination .... we don't have the time or the inclination." Josephine Hart , poetry impresario and editor, writes the reply, linked to below. There are so many things to say about this article, I will number my comments. 1. Nothing is more trite or tiresome than yet another trumped up literary debate. 2. The ping-pong story: poetry dead, poetry not dead, poetry dead, poetry not dead - should be shelved for another decade. As Andrew Motion , many people involved in the field of poetry, and I, have exp...